Reading this thread made me wondering what's the actual highest number of ignored members on our forums. The record is astonishing: one user has 4855 ignored members! The second place is far far behind with just 293 members on ignore, and the third place has 165 ignored members. The numbers decline slowly after that.

We are recently aware of a security breach which may result in the disclosure of user information, including email addresses and encrypted passwords.

While users with a password that is not easily guessed have less reason to be concerned, we nonetheless recommend that all RCGroups users change their passwords immediately. You can find some guidelines on what constitutes a strong password here. (For the nerds out there, the passwords were hashed with a per-user salt, meaning that each password would need to be deciphered individually.)

If you used the same password for RCGroups as for your email account, this is a no-no, and we recommend you immediately change your email account password as well. It is a bad idea to share passwords between any two accounts, so please use this opportunity to make sure you aren't doing that.

Please note that RCGroups will NEVER email you to ask for your password. Always be careful clicking links within emails, even if it appears that those emails came from us, as it is possible that the bad guys are trying to trick you.

We're sorry for any inconvenience. We've taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future. We will keep you updated if we learn anything else that could be of value to you.

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Here is another bit of interesting data - the reporting stats for the last 90 days, and for the last 30 days:

Code:

1359 unique members reported posts in the last 90 days
546 members reported more than one post in the last 90 days
134 members reported more than 5 posts in the last 90 days
606 unique members reported posts in the last month
187 members reported more than one post in the last month
40 members reported more than 5 posts in the last month

Incidentally I have the same stats from October, 2008 saved:

Code:

897 unique members reported posts in the last 90 days
392 members reported more than one post in the last 90 days
99 members reported more than 5 posts in the 90 days
433 unique members reported posts in the last month
149 members reported more than one post in the last month
32 members reported more than 5 posts in the last month

On a related note, the moderation stats from the previous post are now available (and regularly updated) on the dedicated page. It will be linked from the Stats block on the home page and from the site footer.

Google has been sending these hilarious videos to their customers to commemorate the 10th birthday of the Google AdWords program. Since we have been using AdWords, we got one, too. Here's our video. Enjoy!

On November 26, we've passed 10,000 daily posts mark - there were 10,944 posts added that day. Interestingly, today (December 2) we've passed 10,000 mark again with 10,055 total posts. Is it a sign of the pre-holiday times?

To put it in a perspective, it's almost the number of posts the next big RC board has in a whole week!

So we've been running the mod that shows the most active forum on the member blog page for some time now. It calculates the most active forum data on demand when a member blog page is viewed and then stores it in the database. Here are some interesting stats based on that data - the percentage of users which have a forum as their most active, top 50 list:

If you visited a forum powered by phpBB forum software, you probably noticed the "most active forum" and "most active thread" in the member stats (ex. TheProfileBrotherhood.com). I always thought it's a nice thing to have at RCGroups, but with the database structure utilized by our forum software it wasn't very feasible from the performance standpoint. But there is nothing impossible for our search engine! So here it is:

If you like to track the noteworthy threads by subscribing to them, or you are auto-subscribing to all threads you reply to, you may be interested in a new feature - it's now possible to limit search to just your subscribed threads by using an appropriate option in the advanced search page.

There's one gotcha - for the performance reasons only the latest 4000 subscribed threads are fetched for searching. So those 19 members who have more than that wouldn't be able to use this feature in the fullest.

P.S. I have just 1333 subscribed threads here, far less than the record 9448 threads...

Yesterday we rolled out a new feature in the FS/W section of our forums: thread sort by the author's distance from you.

For it to work, you should have the latitude and longitude of your location set in your forum profile. The easiest way to do it is to use the new Set Location page in My RCGroups.

Having done that, head to one of the FS/W forums and observe a new distance column in the thread list. If a thread author has his lat/lon coordinates set in his profile, you'll see the distance between you and him in that column. To sort the thread list from the closest to you to the farthest, click on the "Distance" word in the column header.

It's hard to believe but RCGroups has been running for almost 4 straight years on a single web frontend server. Despite all the increase in traffic and user activity, and the CPU utilization being near or over 100% in the busy hours, it handled the load just fine. But it was evident that it's time to move on. So a few days ago another frontend server was added to offload most of the traffic from the main server. The addition has been absolutely transparent, and the cool thing is that should the need arise, we can add new frontend servers on the fly and the load will be distributed among them.